Another day spent weeding, cutting back, uprooting. Rowdy treelets seeding all around. Dig out one plum tree sapling and a dozen more resilient suckers shoot up in its place. The mountain's formerly abandoned state struggling to re-assert itself. The spruce forest pressing in at the edges. Each year the unruliest tangle suppressed a little more. A thousand slow but steady acts of progress.
When I arrive it's hours coasting on roads emptied of traffic. Norwegian spruce flanks interrupted by villages with postcard houses. Farmsteads with bell crowned barns. Falu red paint with white frames.
The treeline giving ground to fields of sheep penned by zigzag roundpole fences, built from saplings, tied with peels of bark tightening as they dry.
Buzzards perching atop the tallest posts.
The forest swelling with valuable deciduous species †. Saplings rising from newly cleared understory, spread by established trees, emerging from buried seedbanks. The woody mulch receptive to rain and sun. Each change made here considered and weighed. Allowing the history of the land, and its currently changing climate, to guide its future.
† Species list: 2024-03-17
A century of forestry influence overwriting the region. A new machine efficiency exported across Northern Europe. Tree coverage increasing as scorpion harvesters skin the blighted scene. Historical patchwork of land-forms squeezed out by spruce barrens. Each tree aged and spaced the same. Aligned in file. Biodiversity shrinking back beneath the crop.
Three years on the mountain revealing the signs of former inhabitation. Massed piles of granite, clusters of garden escapee rose, starved and budless orchard apple. Traces of mixed land use replaced by single species plantation.
A simplified terrain that still supports a range of flora and fauna, though each round of logging and replanting further depletes its threatened ecosystem.
Pushing us all to the limits of our tolerance.
I flip an upsided dor beetle (Anoplotrupes stercorosus) and watch it scurry away into fallen, rotten wood.
Reclaiming deciduous treescape. Scores of suppressed Oak, crowded Rowan, creeping Juniper. Aspen. Ash. Beech. Hawthorn. Hazel. Hornbeam. Maple. Spots of out-competed Willow, their thin canopies and half-dead trunks worked upon by woodpeckers. Swollen stubs erupting where once thick boughs lay broken.